This is a mini-blog. I'm working to find a compromise between a tweet and a lengthy essay. I find it difficult to complete longer documents because of an obsession with perfection. So this little experiment is to see if I can create a blog of mini articles. Herein I will talk about many technical things generally related to software development and Agile practices.

11 October 2017

Dogma

So getting back into the blogging rhythm is proving challenge. I'm going to try to do the 3x a week thing again, but I might be a bit uneven on the delivery while I get back into it. Please be patient, I'm just rearranging my self a bit too much right now, but I'll get there. --------------Apropos nothing and everything at the same time, Dogma is BAD.Blind adherence to a method or practice leads to stagnation and complacence. Right at the moment I'm working on learning and understanding some subtleties of using functions as first class objects and how that impacts. What I'm looking for is the balance point between too much and too little of this approach. I'm doing this first because I want to learn something; something I hope will improve my skills as a developer. Secondly, in conversation about exactly this it was difficult to articulate how much of this should and should not be done. After that discussion a few links to various sources were provided and I started digging into this idea. Coming from a C++/Java background originally I'd bought into the idea that everything is an object, if it isn't an object it shouldn't exist (with all the necessary caveats necessary to digest C++ and Java). So, if I accept that that isn't necessarily true (reject dogma) then I need to embrace this new approach. First I need to really understand it and how it works, but then I need to really get into the subtle parts so I can speak coherently about it. This is just one example of the whole dogma thing. You've heard me speak about 'creating cards' and 'you have to because the process says so' etc. elsewhere. The same stuff applies to things like OOD and idiomatic Python or 'Standard Java'. All of this has inspired a bunch of other thoughts I hope to share soon.